The present invention relates to patient transfer devices, and more particularly, to patient transfer devices that help move patients safely and painlessly between stationary environments such as hospital beds or examining tables and mobile environments such as wheel chairs or gurneys.
It is often necessary to move people who are frail and unable to move on their own. For example, it may be necessary to move a patient in a hospital bed to a table in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. The hospital bed and MRI system are not located in the same room. Hospital beds are generally too large to move about a hospital, so the patient must be moved from the bed to a gurney or wheel chair. The patient is then wheeled to the MRI system and transferred onto the MRI table.
The operations involved in transferring the patient from the hospital bed to the wheelchair or gurney and unloading the patient onto the table can be difficult, particularly when the patient is frail, is recovering from an operation, or suffers from a medical condition that makes movement painful. If the transfer process is too harsh, the patient may experience discomfort or be physically harmed.
Conventional transfer techniques have tended to rely on patient lifts. Lifts generally require a caregiver to roll the patient prior to transfer to position the lift's sling. Patients must then be hoisted from the bed, placed in a wheelchair, and tugged upon to sit them upright in the wheelchair. The entire process is cumbersome, potentially painful for the patient, and poses a risk of injury to both the caretaker and the patient.
It would therefore be desirable to provide improved patient transfer arrangements such as those that avoid the lifting, rolling, bending, and dragging of patients associated with conventional patient transfer methods.